Virtual Lecture Transcript: "Backwater Puritans?" Racism, Egyptological Stereotypes, and the Intersection of Local and International at Kushite Tombos By Stuart Tyson Smith Saturday, March 20, 2021 Liska Radachi: Hello, everyone, and good afternoon, good evening or good morning depending on where you are joining us from. I'm Liska Radachi. I'm the US director at ARCE and I want to welcome you to the final in our four-part series, Africa Interconnected Ancient Egypt, and Nubia. So, this virtual lecture series has delved into the history and interconnections of ancient Egypt and Nubia, the study of which has been largely marginalized by Western scholarship. And this series has addressed the biases behind this lack of attention and examine how Egyptology, Nubiology and other disciplines have intersected. And today's lecture with Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith, is titled Backwater Puritans, racism, Egyptological stereotypes, and the intersection of local and international at Kushite Tombos. So, before I introduce Dr. Tyson Smith, for those of you who are new to ARCE, we're a private nonprofit organization whose mission is to support research on all aspects of Egyptian history and culture, foster a broader knowledge about Egypt among the general public, and support American Egyptian cultural ties. And as a nonprofit, we rely on our ARCE members to support our work. So, I first want to give a special welcome and hello to all of our ARCE members joining us today. And if you're not already a member and are interested in joining, and by either visit our website arce.org to join online and learn more. We provide a suite of benefits to our members, including our private member only lecture series, so members have access to those lectures as well. Our next public lecture is March 27th, at 1:00pm Eastern Time, and is a special lecture and musical performance with Dr. Nicholas Mangialardi, Ahmed Harfoush, and the Harfoush jazz band titled Zikra, remembering, 'Abd Al-Halim Hafiz. And you can register on our website at arce.org and find out more information. It's going to be a wonderful event; I really encourage you to attend if you can. And as a final remember to all of our members joining us today, you will receive a reduced rate to our annual meeting as part of your member benefits, which this year again will be virtual, and it will take place April 22nd through 25th. Our registration is now open, and we hope to see you all there for a great few days of paper presentations. And now I'm going to introduce you to our fantastic speaker today, Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith is a professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for social, behavioral, and economic research at University of California, Santa Barbara. Smith's research centers on the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Nubia with a theoretical focus on the social and ethnic dynamics of colonial encounters and the origins of the Kushite state whose rulers became Pharaohs of Egypt's 25th dynasty. He has also participated in and led archaeological expeditions to Egypt since 1997, and to Sudanese Nubia, where he co-directs the UCSB Purdue University Tombos expedition to the third cataract of the Nile. This research has been 1 funded by multiple grants from the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation. And in addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Dr. Smith has published three books; Askut in Nubia: The Economics of Ideology of Egyptian Imperialism in the Second Millennium BC, Valley of the Kings for children, and Wretched Kush, Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt's Nubian Empire. And in 1993, he took a break from academia as an Egyptological consultant for the hit MGM movie Stargate, commenting on the script and recreating spoken ancient Egyptian for the film. How cool is that? He returned to the Hollywood consulting in 1998 and 2000 for the universal remake of The Mummy and its sequel, The Mummy Returns, and most recently 2018's web production Stargate Origins Catherine. Professor Smith holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles. So welcome, Dr. Tyson Smith. Stuart Tyson Smith: Thank you very much for that kind invitation- introduction. And let me go ahead and share my screen. Yeah. There we go. Okay. This unfortunate representation from National Geographic magazine of Kushite Pharaoh Piankhi's siege of Memphis in 726 BCE reflects Egyptological and more popular perceptions of Nubia and Nubians as a periphery to civilized Egypt, interlopers in the broader Mediterranean world. Even though Kushites Pharaohs have ruled Egypt for decades by this time, they are still depicted as barbarians at the gate. John Wilson- just one second- writing in the 1950s reflects this dismissive attitude towards Nubians when describing the Kushite dynasty, and I quote, from a capital at the fourth cataract, Piankhi, an Ethiopian, by which he means a Nubian, ruled the Sudan and Nubia. His culture was a provincial imitation of earlier Egypt, fanatical in its retention of religious form. The story of Piankhi's conquest of Egypt is an extraordinarily interesting human document, particularly in the contrast between this backwater Puritan and the effete and sophisticated Egyptians. He goes on to say, thus Egypt fell under the nominal rule of an Ethiopian from the despised provinces and under the effectual rule of a woman. The woman he refers to is the God's wife of Amun, Amenirdis, who you see here in a statue from the Egyptian Museum. So, he manages to be both racist and sexist at the same time. For Egyptologists, maybe it has historically been perceived as an uncivilized periphery. Depictions of Nubians from earlier periods of Egyptian history like Tutankhamen's painted box, reinforce these ideas and surely served as an inspiration for this rather odd National Geographic illustration as well as some of Wilson's and other Egyptologists' ideas about Nubia. Note the way the Kushite soldiers are represented, their musculature and poses and their anachronistic costume and weaponry. The modern artist, however, goes even farther than his or her Egyptian prototype racializing the depictions. Note the contrast between Egyptian straight and Kushite curled here. This is not present on Tut’s box in keeping with New Kingdom military traditions, Egyptians had adopted the Nubians tightly curled hairstyle and Egyptians in general anyway had curly hair. The same can be said of the juxtaposition of costume in the reconstruction, which are almost all of roughly cut hide for the Kushites and neatly trimmed and in hand linen for the Egyptians. In contrast, some of the Nubians on Tutankhamen's box are wearing kilts and the Egyptian soldier in the middle wears a kind of loincloth with leather webbing that was also borrowed from Nubia and appears on some of the Kushite soldiers as well. Whether or not they were really wearing them by Piankhi's reign, the Kushite hide kilts would have 2 been much more finely finished in keeping with the Nubian mastery of high-quality leather work. And you can see some examples here from our excavations at a Kerma period cemetery, a bit south of Tombos, and you look at the beautiful stitching on this, you found entire kind of leather skirts and other garments. This perforated leather, the picture in the middle with incredibly fine hemming, perhaps from a pillow, and then the braided leather, just amazing leather workers. So, they would have looked much nicer. And in fact, you can see on the box, the leather kilts that the Nubians are wearing are in fact, neatly trimmed. Finally, the Kushite soldiers attacked savagely with daggers. The Egyptians have swords, yet the Egyptian soldier is the one with the dagger in Tutankhamen's scene. The National Geographic artist has created a new topos of the Kushite other with an implied contrast between primitive and barbaric Nubians conquering their more civilized Northern neighbor. This kind of representation of Kush serves to reproduce and perpetuate a colonial and ultimately racist perspective that justified the authority of Western empires, in this case in "black African" whose peoples could not create or maintain a civilized life without the help of an external power. In America, of course, the topos subordinate Nubians played into justifications for segregation and discrimination, often informed by the representation of foreigners in Egyptian art as kind of parallel to our modern conditions. But it's important to recognize that Tutankhamen's artisans and the others who preceded and followed them had a specific purpose in mind, the creation of negative ethnic stereotypes that emphasized the inferiority and disorganization of the "barbarians" and surrounded the inner order. And by the way, that applied equally to people from Western Asia, as well as from other parts of North Africa. This is masterfully rendered in microcosm on Tutankhamen's bog with the Egyptian soldier confidently striding on the battlefield, surrounded by a chaotic array of dead and dying Nubians. [inaudible] paints a similar picture of barbaric chaos with a description of the very ethnic components of Xerxes as Persian army, including Nubians clad in leopard skins, wielding crude weapons. In both ideologies, foreign enemies were used to represent the disorder that surrounded a civilized inner order, emphasizing the moral and political authority of their core civilizations. I think the leopard skin quote is what inspired the leopard skin kilts here, which I don't know from the earlier depiction of Nubians. At Persepolis, the Persians themselves, however, had a different idea when depicting Nubians. Here Nubians are exotic, rather strange giraffe kind of squished a bit in the back, but depicted in an ethnic stereotype that is not necessarily negatively marked as unsophisticated and barbaric.